Two French Art Shows Look Both Forward And Back

PARIS — Art museums around the world have worked mightily to come up with exhibitions appropriate for the millenium, but few could have been as successful as two that are in their last days here.

"Visions of the Future," at the Grand Palais, and "According to the Antique," at the Louvre, are ostensibly unrelated and do not at all proclaim millennial intentions. However, when taken together, they give a Janus-like look forward and back at concerns that appear timely in our moment of calendrical celebration.

"Visions" uses artworks, manuscripts, scientific inventions, even comic strips to provide, as the show's subtitle says, "a history of the fears and hopes of humanity." "Antique" is a show containing only works of art in many media and from many time periods. Still, by exploring the influence of a particular epoch of creation, it inevitably deals with how we have sought enduring lessons from the past that, at base, address some of humanity's same hopes and fears.

Shows like "Visions" usually present depictions of how the future appeared to artists in several fields. It's the stuff of science fiction and cannot help but also be present in "Visions," though it does not dominate the exhibition. Instead, three broad themes - "The Quest for Eternity," "The Wait for the End of Time," and "The Dreams of Modernity" - explore many considerations that cut across time and place, being as relevant to, say, an aboriginal chief as a dot-com baron.

Given that the hopes of humanity frequently grow from its fears, the content of "Visions" is seldom cheery. We never can quite get away from the fact that the future is always death. The very first room underlines it, with such objects as a Colombian funeral mask, an Egyptian sarcophagus and an exhumed cranium from New Guinea. The point is what each of these cultures, and others made of death in order to continue with life. "Visions" is exceptional in illustrating how the need to make something of it is common to all eras.

Four rooms address the "quest for eternity," which is conducted to perpetuate the memory of the dead. In most cases, immortalized figures were regents or various kinds of heroes whose likenesses were sculpted or painted. But one section of the show is also devoted to buildings, and it gives the incomparable thrill of seeing a tiny gold tablet declaring the founding of Khorsabad (17 centuries before the birth of Christ) alongside medieval maquettes and foundation stones from Western Europe.

Each piece in itself is a surpassing work of art that is further enhanced by an unusually wide-ranging context. Moreover, the context goes further than merely paying lip service -- as so many exhibitions do -- to current ideas of multiculturalism. Every culture represented adds substantially to the themes being explored; the show would be poorer without each of them. And in a way that cannot help but move the viewer, the choice of pieces is so appropriate that cultural and temporal differences ultimately drop away in the face of motivations of the deepest common significance.

"The Wait for the End of Time" takes viewers on a journey from the apocalypse, to paradise and resurrection, with a side trip, so to speak, to the New Jerusalem. Among the surprises are 40 visual "commentaries" on Dante's The Divine Comedy by the Flemish-Italian mannerist Giovanni Stradano. But the show's revelation of Stradano's visionary intensity comes as much from the works themselves as from how they are heightened by being in a room that contains (among much else) a study for paradise by Tintoretto, papyrus leaves from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a Greek amphora that shows the weighing of dead souls and part of the plaster model for Auguste Rodin's "Gate of Hell."

Science takes over from religion in the final third of the exhibition, which is a conceptual grab-bag including inventions by Alexander Graham Bell, a virtual library of science fiction, an early airplane motor, a reconstruction of Kasimir Malevich's 1919 "Monument to the Third Internationale" and contemporary pieces by Panamarenko and Tom Shannon. Two of the bigger works -- by Ilya Kabakov and Bodys Isek Kingelez -- also had appeared in isolation in Chicago. But here, owing to context, they appear deeper, which is as good evidence as any that "Visions" is the rarest of group shows, one that uses art to illuminate general themes that clarify individual pieces.

"According to the Antique" is focused more tightly on art objects and formal issues. However, its central theme of how generations of artists have looked to antiquity bespeaks a broader age-old impulse: to learn from the past in ways that are not only artistic but humanistic.